Tuesday, December 30, 2014

Get ready...get set...get reading. The next twelve months are about to roll over you with an avalanche of gotta-get-it fiction and it's going to take all of your stamina to keep up.

Not that I'd expect anyone to "keep up." Hell, I'm still working on my 2012 must-read list (make that "the lists from 2006-2012") and don't even get me started on last year's most-anticipated books list. I've only read four out of those 20 titles. And now they'll have to scoot over and make room on the shelf for the books listed below.

In the meantime, nothing's stopping you from stocking your larder with what looks like some of the year's finest fiction. Of course, the following titles represent only the smallest snowflake on the tip of the 2015 publishing iceberg. There's another half-a-jillion books which will be published this year and they're waiting for you to discover them. I'm not including non-fiction, poetry, graphic novels or children's literature on this list because that would just hurt my head. These are the novels and short story collections which have captured my attention and earned their way onto my ever-growing To-Be-Read pile (aka Mount NeveRest). Note: cover art and the opening lines I've quoted here are subject to change prior to publication.

In her author's note, Bergman (author of Birds of a Lesser Paradise) says these short stories were "born of fascination with real women whose remarkable lives were reduced to footnotes." And so we get a baker's dozen of tales about speedboat racers, conjoined twins, reclusive painters and members of the first all-female, integrated swing band. We also see the titular almost-famous: Lord Byron’s illegitimate daughter, Allegra; Oscar Wilde’s troubled niece, Dolly; West With the Night author Beryl Markham; and Edna St. Vincent Millay’s sister, Norma.

After dazzling us with novels about marauding bears (The Wilding) and werewolves (Red Moon), what's next for Percy? A "post-apocalyptic reimagining of the Lewis and Clark saga" when "a super flu and nuclear fallout have made a husk of the world we know." This immediately reminds me of "Meltdown," a terrific short story in Percy's short story collection Refresh Refresh which also imagines a nuclear-winter future. Cheery? Maybe not. Outstanding writing? Almost certainly! First line: She knows there is something wrong with the baby.

After The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet, Larson's 2010 creatively designed novel about a twelve-year-old genius mapmaker, it's felt like a long wait for this new book. At its center is the titular Radar, a child savant like T. S. Spivet, who's struggling to understand the mysterious circumstances of his birth and the strange medical condition which he's lived with ever since. I Am Radar spans history and the globe (Norway, Cambodia, Yugoslavia, the Congo) and involves a large cast of characters, all of them linked in some way to Radar. First line: It was just after midnight in birthing room 4C and Dr. Sherman, the mustached obstetrician presiding over the delivery, was sweating lightly into his cotton underwear, holding out his hand like a beggar, ready to receive the imminent cranium.

Inspired by the life of a woman who was profiled in Joseph Mitchell's classic Up in the Old Hotel, Attenberg's new novel introduces us to Mazie Phillips, the "big-hearted and bawdy proprietress of The Venice, the famed New York City movie theater." Attenberg doesn't shy away from larger-than-life characters (See Also: The Middlesteins), and this new novel is especially appealing to me for a variety of reasons: part of it takes place during the Jazz Age, it's narrated oral-biography-style by a chorus of voices (including excerpts from Mazie's diary), and old movie palaces like The Venice really tickle my fancy--they're the bee's knees! I can't wait to take a seat and enjoy Attenberg's show.

2015 will also see a bumper crop of fiction about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Here are just some of the novels which have come to my attention:

Two of the chief complaints about literature coming out of our two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are that the former war has almost completely eclipsed the latter and that the narrative voices and characters are almost exclusively American--where are the stories told from the perspective of Iraqis or Afghans? This debut novel coming from a Marine who served a total of five tours in both conflicts will neatly check both of those blocks. Set in Afghanistan, Green on Blue is about two brothers, Aziz and Ali, who are forced to live a life on the streets after their village is attacked by armed men. Aziz eventually joins the Special Lashkar, a U.S.-funded militia, and as he rises through the ranks, he "becomes mired in the dark underpinnings of his country's war, witnessing clashes between rival Afghan groups--what U.S. soldiers call green on green attacks--and those on U.S. forces by Afghan soldiers, violence known as green on blue." My Twitter feed has been repeatedly hit by recommendations for Ackerman's novel, so I'm moving this one to near the summit of Mount NeveRest.

This novel--also a debut from a veteran and set in Afghanistan--opens with a chapter titled "Be Polite but Have a Plan to Kill Everyone You Meet." I'm immediately interested and sit up a little straighter in my chair, then lean forward into the book. The publisher's plot synopsis says I'd Walk With My Friends If I Could Find Them is about "three American soldiers haunted by their actions in Afghanistan (who) search for absolution and human connection in family and civilian life." Looks like 2015 is shaping up to be the Year of the Forgotten War. I'm putting Goolsby's novel right up there near Green on Blue at the top of the pile. One other note: I'd Walk With My Friends If I Could Find Them gets my vote for Most Interesting Character Name: Wintric Ellis.

This novel (yes, another debut by a combat vet) about a U.S. Special Forces unit is set in "Afghanipakiraqistan—the preferred name for the ambiguous stretch of the world where the U.S. Special Forces operate with little outside attention." I haven't had a chance to examine an advance copy of The Knife, but from the description and the words of praise from writers like Stuart Dybek and Michael Koryta, it looks like it combines an action-heavy plot with some good character introspection. Which is the way it is in the military: brief, sporadic bursts of activity which punctuate long periods of "hurry up and wait."

I'm really intrigued by this novel about two arts-loving friends, nicknamed "The Encyclopaedists," who'd planned to attend graduate school together until one of them learns he's going to Iraq with his National Guard unit. In the year that follows, the two keep in touch with one another by editing a Wikipedia article about themselves, which the publisher's synopsis describes as "smart and funny updates that morph and deepen throughout the year, culminating in a document that is both devastatingly tragic and profoundly poetic." This appears to be a novel as much about the tangle of human relationships (two girlfriends are also involved) as it does about war.

I first heard about Renehan's novel from bookseller Barbara Theroux. Whenever I visit Fact and Fiction Books in Missoula, Montana, I make a point of asking Barbara if she's read anything good lately. A few months ago, her eyes lit up as she said, "The Valley. I just finished reading an advance copy. It's by a Army veteran--I forget his name right now--but it's set in Afghanistan during the war and it is so, so good." As soon as I got to the nearest computer, I made a point of looking up the novel and the author's name and mentally bookmarking it as a Must-Read for 2015. Because when a bookseller says you have to read something, you'd better obey. First line: In the dream he climbed a narrow foot-trail alone in the sun, on a bare mountainside littered with metal corpses. (Other Recommended Reading by John Renehan: Of This World in The American Spectator.)

When was the last time you read a riveting novel about badger baiting? Or a book that treats the hard work of farming with all the respect it deserves? Okay, maybe there are some good agricultural novels out there, but badger-baiting fiction? I'd be hard-pressed to come up with some titles. Jones' novel is threaded with two narratives--one about an unnamed man who illegally catches and kills badgers in rural Wales and one about a recently-widowed farmer struggling through lambing season. The publisher describes The Dig as "Marilynne Robinson meets Cormac McCarthy. Or like Ian McEwan writing a western." While it may be those things, I've read the first few pages and I can tell you it's also filled with sentences which feel lyrically expansive and, at the same time, purified down to their essence. Jones gets good mileage from his imagery--like this early description of the badger hunter: "He was a gruff and big man and when he got from the van it lifted and relaxed like a child relieved of the momentary fear of being hit."

I know what some of you are thinking: "Ooo, a new Nick Hornby! I can't wait to read it!" Me, I'm sitting here mentally grumbling, "Oh, great. Another Hornby. Let's see, that'll put me about four novels behind in my reading of his books." Actually, that's just one voice inside me; the other is also rejoicing with you about the arrival of Funny Girl. I'll get to it posthaste--just as soon as I tick off some other books of his, like About a Boy, which is on my Five-Year Reading Plan of the Essentials. For those of you Hornby fans who can't wait to pick up this new one: Funny Girl is set in Swinging 60s London and features a new literary heroine, Sophie Straw, who rises from ingenue to TV starlet. That's about all I know, but it's probably all you need.

I'm all like, "Ooo, a new Tom McGuane!" And this time, I will dig in with fork and knife right away since I've read the majority of the iconic Montana writer's other books (not that this is always a prerequisite, but my reading habits usually send me to earlier, better-known works by an author before reading his or her new releases). This collection of short stories (his first since Gallatin Canyon nine years ago) comes with these neat plot summaries: a devoted son is horrified to discover his mother’s antics before she slipped into dementia; a father’s outdoor skills are no match for an ominous change in the weather; lifelong friends on a fishing trip finally confront their deep dislike; and a cattle inseminator succumbs to the lure of a stranger's offer of easy money. You know, the usual McGuanian cast of scalawags and charmers. First line: I picked up my father on a sultry morning with heavy, rumbling clouds on the horizon.

Simmons must own a T-Shirt that reads "I Like Big Books and I Cannot Lie." He wouldn't know the underside of a 200-page novel if it came up and gave him a papercut. His Drood and The Terror take up a lot of real estate on my bookshelf. But hey, there's nothing wrong with this. I cannot lie: I like big books, too. And now along comes The Fifth Heart, clocking in at 624 pages and with a story just as big: In 1893, Sherlock Holmes and Henry James come to America together to solve the mystery of the 1885 death of Clover Adams, wife of the esteemed historian Henry Adams. If I don't already have your attention, you may as well just move along. Further intriguing me is this snippet from the publisher's synopsis: "Holmes is currently on his Great Hiatus--his three-year absence after Reichenbach Falls during which time the people of London believe him to be deceased. Holmes has faked his own death because, through his powers of ratiocination, the great detective has come to the conclusion that he is a fictional character. This leads to serious complications for James--for if his esteemed fellow investigator is merely a work of fiction, what does that make him?" The First Line, though wordy, is still pretty hook-y: In the rainy March of 1893, for reasons that no one understands (primarily because no one besides us is aware of this story), the London-based American author Henry James decided to spend his April 15 birthday in Paris and there, on or before his birthday, commit suicide by throwing himself into the Seine at night.

When I was growing up, I had a thing for the Loch Ness Monster. Forty years later, that "thing" hasn't really abated. I was never more jealous of my wife when, two years ago, she went on a trip to Scotland without me and stood on the shores of the misty loch. I was only slightly appeased by the fact that she didn't see anything in the shape of a log or a periscope sticking up out of the water. Sara Gruen has now thrown gasoline on my fire with her new novel set during World War Two in which Madeline Hyde, a young socialite from Philadelphia, "reluctantly follows her husband and their best friend to the tiny village of Drumnadrochit in search of a mythical monster" (i.e. "Nessie"). Though I was only a half-hearted fan of Water for Elephants, I'm looking forward to reading this new novel from Gruen. At least, the 11-year-old kid in me is interested in it.

After a successful writing career of memoirs and non-fiction accounts of small-town America (Visiting Tom, Population: 485, et al), Perry is coming out with a novel which opens with this Prologue:

On Christmas Eve itself, the bachelor Harley Jackson stepped into his barn and beheld there illuminated in the straw a smallish newborn bull calf upon whose flank was borne the very image of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. "Well," said Harley, "that's trouble."

Paging Garrison Keillor, you're needed on Aisle 8 for a clean-up--someone spilled a box of chuckles. Poor Harley is besieged not just by holy cows, he's got a whole peck and bushelful of other situations to handle. Here's the publisher's synopsis to explain: "A woman in a big red pickup has stolen his bachelor's heart, and a Hummer-driving predatory developer is threatening to pave the last vestiges of his family farm....His best friend, Billy, a giant of a man who shares his trailer house with a herd of cats and tries to pass off country music lyrics as philosophy, urges him to avoid the woman, fight the developer, and get rich off the calf. But Harley takes the opposite tack, hoping to avoid what his devout, dearly departed mother would have called 'a scene.' Then the secret gets out--right through the barn door, and Harley's 'miracle' goes viral. Within hours pilgrims, grifters, and the media have descended on his quiet patch of Swivel, Wisconsin, looking for a glimpse (and a percentage) of the calf. Does Harley hide the famous, possibly holy calf and risk a riot, or give the people what they want--and raise enough money to keep his land--and, just possibly, win the woman and her big red pickup truck?"

After re-imagining the tale of Huck Finn in The Boy in His Winter, Lock turns his pen towards the American West, lighting out for fabulous (and possibly fabulist) territory. American Meteor is the story of Stephen Moran ("a scrappy Brooklyn orphan turned vengeful assassin") who crosses the country on the Union Pacific, which has just United the States with its tracks. Along the way, he bumps into General George Custer (pre-Battle of the Little Big Horn, of course), befriends Walt Whitman, becomes a bugler on President Lincoln's funeral train, apprentices with frontier photographer William Henry Jackson, and comes face-to-face with Crazy Horse. It's a lot to pack into 200 pages, but from what I've heard, Lock sure knows how to spin a yarn.

I know I've been using the phrase "I can't wait!" a lot on this list, but when it comes to O'Nan, I really can't wait. Of all the authors who appear in this roll call, he's my favorite (followed closely by Mr. McGuane) and he's the one guy for whom I'd walk barefoot on broken glass scattered across a tarry parking lot on a hot summer day just to shake his hand and tell him thanks for all the great books. This new novel about F. Scott Fitzgerald’s last years in Hollywood looks just as rich and promising as all of the others on my O'Nan shelf. Fitzgeraldines are already familiar with the story, but for those of you who aren't, here's how the publisher orients you for the events in West of Sunset: "In 1937, F. Scott Fitzgerald was a troubled, uncertain man whose literary success was long over. In poor health, with his wife consigned to a mental asylum and his finances in ruins, he struggled to make a new start as a screenwriter in Hollywood. By December 1940, he would be dead of a heart attack." No, it's not the happiest of endings, but it's one which fascinates me as a writer and as a lover of Hollywood's so-called Golden Age (See Also: Dubble, my long-in-gestation novel set in 1940s Tinseltown). Here are the First Lines of West of Sunset: That spring he holed up in the Smokies, in a tired resort hotel by the asylum so he could be closer to her. A bout of pneumonia over Christmas had provoked a flare-up of his TB, and he was still recovering. The mountain air was supposed to help. Days he wrote in his bathrobe, drinking Coca-Cola to keep himself going, holding off on the gin till nightfall--a small point of pride--sipping on the dark verandah as couples strolled among the fireflies rising from the golf course.

I'll admit I'm a sucker for novels about 19th-century ships trapped in Arctic ice with new Baby Daddies just finding out they're Baby Daddies while the rest of the crew looks like they're either going to mutiny or start eating each other. But maybe that's just me. Nonetheless, James' The Surfacing has a pretty good plot hook to draw in even those readers who aren't addicted to 19th-century ships trapped, etc. Take a gander: "The Surfacing is set largely on board a ship in the 1850s, searching for Franklin's lost expedition. It's a challenging and dangerous endeavor in a very male world--that is until Morgan, the second-in-command of the Impetus, realises there is a pregnant stowaway on board and that he is the father. It is too late to turn back, the ice is closing in, and the child will have to be born into the vast and icy wilderness of the Arctic. The men, especially the ship's doctor, DeHaven, and the second in command, Lieutenant Morgan, have doubts about the judgement of their captain, and soon their own vessel becomes trapped in the remote Arctic. It's a novel of isolation and impasse, resilience and resistance, exploring the battle between man and an unforgiving environment, and the struggle between the sexes." I can't tell if this is a cautionary tale about Baby Daddies or a warning about ignoring weather forecasts and icepack movements, but I can tell you I'm going to be drinking plenty of warm fluids while reading this novel.

Palaia's debut is a coming-of-age novel about the way the Vietnam War ripples into lives left back here on the homefront. Centered around Riley, a thirteen-year-old in 1968, whose brother Mick goes missing in Vietnam, The Given World spans two dozen years and, according to the plot synopsis, has a grand, fascinating cast of characters: "Primo, a half-blind vet with a secret he can't keep; Lu, a cab-driving addict with an artist's eye; Phuong, a Saigon barmaid, Riley's conscience and confidante; and Grace, a banjo-playing girl on a train, carrying her grandmother's ashes in a tin box." Riley travels from the Montana plains in the 70s to San Francisco in the 80s and onward to the expat bars and back streets of Saigon in the search for her brother. I'd had The Given World on my radar, but it really jumped to the peak of my To-Be-Read pile after Palaia recently contributed this awesome essay to The Quivering Pen's "My First Time" series.

I'm hoping 2015 is also the year I'm finally able to start exploring the novels and short stories of Luis Alberto Urrea, who has long been a resident of the To-Be-Read Shelf; it's about time he changed his address to the Read Shelf. This new story collection The Water Museum looks ripe for the plucking. To wit: "two boys steal a canoe and head out on a voyage from which one will not return; a dead soldier bequeaths his dog and a mystery to his comrade; a graffiti artist leaves behind an unfathomable message." Here's how the first story ("Mountains Without Number") begins:

In a beat-down house at the foot of a western butte, a woman sips her coffee and stares at her high school yearbook. Most everybody's gone. The pictures seem to be a day old to her. She still laughs at the drama club portrait, still remembers the shouting when the football team won the regional. And there she is on page thirty. She was one of the pretty ones, for sure. One of the slender ones who had a mouth that suggested to every boy that she knew a secret and was slightly amused by it. She had famous lips.

Though Mary Doria Russell's 2011 novel Doc isn't on my official "Essentials Reading List," it's certainly earned a place in my To-Be-Read pile after hearing Washington Post critic Ron Charles rave about the fictional treatment of Doc Holliday's life back when it was published. And now Epitaph, Russell's follow-up novel about the shoot-out at the O.K. Corral, straps on its holster, finger-twirls a pair of pistols, and saunters down my Main Street (and whatever other Western movie cliches I dare to come up with). As the publisher's synopsis notes, the gunfight only lasted thirty seconds, but the lies and legends have taken on a life of their own in the 130-plus years since. First lines: To understand the gunfight in Tombstone, stop--now--and watch a clock for thirty seconds. Listen to it tick while you try to imagine one half of a single minute so terrible it will pursue you all your life and far beyond the grave.

Johnston's novel about a family vacation in the Rocky Mountains gone terribly wrong has been getting a lot of positive buzz lately. From what I've read, it's one of those stand-out books which combines heart-racing suspense with smart, satisfying writing. In this book, the Courtlands are just trying to have one last happy family bonding experience before their daughter heads off to college. Once they reach high altitude, things don't go well for any of them. The jacket copy description: "For eighteen-year-old Caitlin, the mountains loom as the ultimate test of her runner's heart, while her parents hope that so much beauty, so much grandeur, will somehow repair a damaged marriage. But when Caitlin and her younger brother, Sean, go out for an early morning run and only Sean returns, the mountains become as terrifying as they are majestic, as suddenly this family find themselves living the kind of nightmare they've only read about in headlines or seen on TV. As their world comes undone, the Courtlands are drawn into a vortex of dread and recrimination." My knuckles are already white.

If you haven't had enough wilderness-peril literature with Descent, you might try this new novel by the author of Wingshooters and Southland. I'll just let the publisher's plot synopsis do the work for me here: "Four people on a backpacking trip in the Sierra Nevada find more adventure than they ever imagined. Each of them is drawn to the mountains for reasons as diverse as their own lives. Gwen Foster, a counselor for at-risk youth, is struggling with burnout from the demands of her job. Real estate agent Oscar Barajas is adjusting to the fall of the housing market and being a single parent. Todd Harris, an attorney, is stuck in a lucrative but unfulfilling career--and in a failing marriage. They are all brought together by their trainer, Tracy Cole, a former athlete with a taste for risky pursuits. When the hikers start up a pristine mountain trail that hasn't been traveled in years, all they have to guide them is a hand-drawn map of a remote, mysterious place called Lost Canyon. At first, the route past high alpine lakes and under towering, snowcapped peaks offers all the freedom and exhilaration they'd hoped for. But when they stumble onto someone who doesn't want to be found, the group finds itself faced with a series of dangerous conflicts, moral dilemmas, confrontations with nature, and an all-out struggle for survival." I'm getting a good Deliverance vibe from Lost Canyon, but without all those banjos.

The label "Hitchcockian" is tossed around a lot (sometimes erroneously) anytime you see a really good suspense novel (or any novel involving a shower or marauding birds, I suppose), but in the case of Hawkins' debut novel, I think the label will stick. The titular girl on the train is Rachel. She rides the same commuter train to and from London every morning (the 8:04 from Ashbury to Euston) and she likes to stare out the window, fantasizing about the lives of people living in all those houses flashing by. She's even made up a name for one couple--"Jess" and "Jason"--whose two-story Victorian house she practically has memorized right down to the missing roof tiles:

They are a perfect, golden couple. He is dark-haired and well built, strong, protective, kind. He has a great laugh. She is one of those tiny bird-women, a beauty, pale-skinned with blond hair cropped short. She has the bone structure to carry that kind of thing off, sharp cheekbones dappled with a sprinkling of freckles, a fine jaw.

But then one day, Rachel sees something unexpected, something shocking, and she goes to the police to report it. That's when the real trouble begins. So yes, shades of Strangers on a Train, The Wrong Man and North by Northwest abound in this book which promises to be scary-good.

Apart from that striking cover design, I'm drawn to Smith's story collection by the jacket copy summary: "In the stories of Confidence, there are ecstasy-taking PhD students, financial traders desperate for husbands, owners of failing sex stores, violent and unremovable tenants, aggressive raccoons, seedy massage parlors, experimental filmmakers who record every second of their day, and wives who blog insults directed at their husbands. There are cheating husbands. There are private clubs, crowded restaurants, psychiatric wards. There is one magic cinema and everyone has a secret of some kind." Hey, you had me at "aggressive raccoons." Smith, who lives in Toronto, is a well-known journalist and cultural commentator, radio host and Globe & Mail columnist. Though he's been publishing novels since the early 1990s, Confidence marks his U.S. debut.

I'm a fan of Wagman's previous novel The Care and Feeding of Exotic Pets, so I was excited to read in a recent publisher's catalog that she'll have a new book coming out in 2015. Here's the jacket copy for Life #6: "Fiona's marriage is crumbling, and she has recently been diagnosed with breast cancer. Caught up in a wave of memories as she faces her own mortality, Fiona recalls the five previous times in her life that she nearly died, including a fateful boat trip thirty years ago with her former boyfriend, Luc. She flees her life, struggling marriage, and cancer treatment to rendezvous with Luc, in the process reliving the harrowing boat trip the two of them shared three decades earlier, which permanently altered their lives. Now that Fiona desperately needs Luc to save her, will he be the man she remembers? Or will she discover heartbreak again? An adventurous, emotionally complex tale inspired by Diana Wagman's own experience at sea, Life #6 explores the folly of youth, what happens to us when we're pushed to the brink, the regrets of love lost, and what it really means to love, as well as the many ways we die and are renewed throughout our lives." That plot description may sound a little too Nicholas Sparks-ian for what I normally read, but based on what she did in The Care and Feeding of Exotic Pets, I'm confident Wagman will hone the story with a cutting edge of humor. (But even if the novel turns out to be sober-serious, I'm sure it will be fantastic!)

Here's another new book by an author I deeply admire. Torday's 2012 novella The Sensualist, which won the 2012 National Jewish Book Award for debut fiction, was one of my favorite reads of that year and I've spent the last twenty-four months waiting for news of a new release from this terrific author. The day is here! Or almost here; The Last Flight of Poxl West will hit bookstores in March. I'm lucky to have gotten my hands on an advance copy, which comes loaded with glowing praise from the likes of Phil Klay, George Saunders, Edan Lepucki, Karen Russell and Gary Shteyngart, whose blurb is typically Shteyngartian: "OMFG! What a book! Eli Goldstein has the retrospective candor of Roth's Zuckerman and the sensitivity of a Harold Brodkey narrator, and Poxl West is an unforgettable creation. Plus, things happen in this book, big things like the world wars. A delight!" The novel opens with 15-year-old Elijah Goldstein's "Acknowledgement: Prologue" to what will be the bulk of the book's narrative: Poxl West's memoir of his time as a heroic RAF bomber pilot during World War Two. Torday's wit is rapier-sharp even in the title of the book Poxl West has written: Skylock: The Memoir of a Jewish RAF Bomber. I was entranced by the First Lines of the "Prologue" and, now that I have a taste, I'm looking forward to devouring the whole book: Before halftime on Super Bowl Sunday, January 1986, my uncle Poxl came over. He was just months from reaching the height of his fame, and unaware that the game was being played. He wasn't technically my uncle, either. He was an old friend of the family. For years he had taught at a prep school in Cambridge, where my grandfather had served as dean. After a massive heart attack a year after I was born left my grandfather as much a memory to me as thin morning fog, Uncle Poxl came to fill the void. That Sunday he sat down in the living room and, speaking over the game's play-by-play, started a story he could barely clap his gloves free of snow fast enough to tell.

If, like me, you've been waiting for a Toni Morrison novel to deliver the kind of unsparing, uncompromising narrative drive found in her earlier Beloved, I think God Help the Child will scratch that itch. This new novel, due in April, takes on child abuse and racial discrimination, telling a complex story through several characters' viewpoints. The prose has all the spark of a box of matches and wastes no time in getting to the point with these First Lines from the opening section narrated by a character named Sweetness:

It’s not my fault, so you can’t blame me. I didn’t do it and have no idea how it happened. It didn't take more than an hour after they pulled her out from between my legs to realize something was wrong. Really wrong. She was so black she scared me. Midnight black, Sudanese black. I'm light-skinned, with good hair, what we call high yellow, and so is Lula Ann's father. Ain't nobody in my family anywhere near that color.

That baby eventually grows up to be one of the central characters of the story, a woman who calls herself Bride and whose loves and losses we follow throughout the 192 pages of a book that looks like it could be our next literary classic.

The capsule descriptions of the short stories in Griner's new collection are just odd enough to make me pause and give the book a double-take: "A low-ranking soldier is forced to milk a cow within enemy range. A cartoonist's daughter waits each morning to see how her father's mood dictates how he will draw her face. Grieving siblings wait to inherit one of their father's physical features after his death." In this short fiction, we also meet prison telemarketers, famous cartoonists, bone procurers, missing persons and the resurrected dead. Yes, please--I do want to know more!

And now for Something Completely Different...In Delicious Foods, a drug-addicted mother leaves her eleven-year-old son to go work on a mysterious farm run by a shady company called Delicious Foods. There, on the remote farm, the mother (Darlene) is held captive, performing hard labor in the fields to pay off the supposed debt for her food, lodging, and the constant stream of drugs the farm provides to her and the other unfortunates imprisoned there. Meanwhile, her panic-stricken son Eddie desperately tries to find her so they can finally live the good life they deserve. Delicious Foods has been getting heaps of praise from readers who say it's equally terrifying, heartbreaking and satisfying. Based on the opening pages alone, my impression is that Hannaham writes like a semi-truck barreling down the interstate at 90 miles per hour. I had a hard time lifting my eyes from the page after reading the Prologue which opens with a seventeen-year-old Eddie careening along the road in a Subaru:

After escaping from the farm, Eddie drove through the night. Sometimes he thought he could feel his phantom fingers brushing against his thighs, but above the wrists he now had nothing. No hands. Dark stains covered the terry cloth wrapped around the ends of his wrists; his mother had stanched the bleeding with rubber cables. For the first hour or so, the rocky, divot-riddled road jostled the car, increasing the young man's agony, and he clenched his teeth through the sickening pain. Steering the vehicle with his forearms stuck in two of the wheel's holes, Eddie couldn't keep the Subaru from wobbling and swerving, and he feared the police would notice, pull him over to find that he had no license, and arrest him for stealing the car.

Wow. Note to self: want to fully engage the reader? Cut off a boy's hands in the opening paragraph.

"Funny, brutal and haunting, Haints Stay takes the traditional Western, turns it inside out, eviscerates it, skins it, and then wears it as a duster. This is the kind of book that would make Zane Grey not only roll over in his grave but rise undead from the ground with both barrels blazing." --Brian Evenson

"I loved it. Loved it. Haints Stay had me from the very first line--the visceral ante upped and crescendoing nearly every page. Humor, gore, that wonderful unsettling feel you get when you're reading a book that excites you and kind of scares you as well? Yes, please." --Lindsay Hunter

Okay, now I'm really interested. Tell me more, Mr. Jacket Copy:

Brooke and Sugar are killers. Bird is the boy who mysteriously woke beside them while between towns. For miles, there is only desert and wilderness, and along the fringes, people. The story follows the middling bounty hunters after they've been chased from town, and Bird, each in pursuit of their own sense of belonging and justice. It features gunfights, cannibalism, barroom piano, a transgender birth, a wagon train, a stampede, and the tenuous rise of the West's first one-armed gunslinger.

Sold!

Purityby Jonathan Franzen
J-Franz lovers, mark your calendar for September. That's when you'll want to call in sick so you can spend some time with this new novel from the author of The Corrections and Freedom. What's it about, you ask? Here's how Jonathan Galassi, president and publisher of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, described the novel to the New York Times: "a multigenerational American epic that spans decades and continents. The story centers on a young woman named Purity Tyler, or Pip, who doesn’t know who her father is and sets out to uncover his identity. The narrative stretches from contemporary America to South America to East Germany before the collapse of the Berlin Wall, and hinges on the mystery of Pip’s family history and her relationship with a charismatic hacker and whistleblower." Hmm, sounds deliberately Dickensian to me. Not that there's anything wrong with that. I can already feel a sudden "cold and flu" coming on in September. Sorry, boss.

And finally, I'll leave you with two books I'm not anticipating....because I've already read them! But I do hope you'll add these to your most-anticipated fiction of 2015 list.

Who would have thought the 1975 fall of Saigon could be so hilarious? In his debut, Nguyen does exactly that with a non-stop stream of dark humor narrated by a Viet Cong captain who is working undercover for a South Vietnamese general and reporting all that he sees and hears back to his Communist bosses--even after the general and his compatriots flee the country and set up a new life in Los Angeles. The Sympathizer is like a neon-pink whoopee cushion snuck into a high-level State Department briefing. Go ahead, laugh. Nguyen has given us permission to see both the light and dark sides of a regretful chapter in the histories of both the United States and Vietnam in a tale told by a court jester. The Sympathizer is one of the smartest, darkest, funniest books you'll read in 2015. First lines: I am a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces. Perhaps not surprisingly, I am also a man of two minds.

Shields writes weird, dark, funny tales sprinkled with magical-realism dust (see also: Favorite Monsters, her earlier short story collection). In her debut novel, she turns her imagination loose in the forests of the Pacific Northwest and the result is one of the most unforgettable books of the year. I was surprised at nearly every turn in The Sasquatch Hunter's Almanac. I think I was expecting something of a quirky monster story with porous barriers between reality and fairy tales. There's certainly some of that at play here; but what Shields has taken on is something larger and even more emotionally expansive: she's delivered a multi-generational family saga (which goes from 1943 to 2006) that's full of love, pain, mystery, revelation, hubris and humility. At the novel's vivid, beating heart stands Eli Roebuck who, when he's a nine-year-old boy, watches his mother walk off into the woods with a huge, hairy "man" named Mr. Krantz who may or may not be Sasquatch. Eli is convinced he is, and he spends the rest of the novel trying to track him down and, by extension, find his mother. To Shields' credit, she keeps even the reader wondering about the true nature of Mr. Krantz, thus making us think about the very basic elements of fiction itself: Who am I? Who are you? And who's that guy standing over there with the "deep hooded brow, small blank eyes, thin-lipped mouth like a long pink gash" and whose "wide, shoeless feet" are "two hairy sleds that move noiselessly over the wooden floorboards as though through a soft snow"? The Sasquatch Hunter's Almanac is riveting, endearing and edged with a sly wit (Eli, the Bigfoot hunter, is a podiatrist by profession). Bottom line: you may come for the monsters, but you'll stay for the humans--who can be just as strange and scary (and hairy). As one character says near the end of the book, "I want to say thank you for allowing me to believe in magic." Bravo, Sharma Shields, bravo!

Monday, December 29, 2014

My First Time is a regular feature in which writers talk about virgin experiences in their writing and publishing careers, ranging from their first rejection to the moment of holding their first published book in their hands. Today’s guest is Sharma Shields, author of The Sasquatch Hunter's Almanac, coming from Henry Holt in early 2015. This debut novel has been described as "a dark, fantastical, multi-generational tale about a family whose patriarch is consumed by the hunt for the mythical, elusive Sasquatch he encountered in his youth." It's been gathering a lot of praise prior to its publication, like this from Kirkus: "Imagine a mash up of Moby-Dick and Kafka's Metamorphosis (with a hearty dash of Twin Peaks thrown in), and you'll begin to get an idea of what Shields' ambitious tale of disenchantment sets out to do." (On a personal note, I am an unabashed champion and evangelist for The Sasquatch Hunter's Almanac. It took me to unexpected places and genuinely moved me in ways that few recent novels have done. I'm strongly encouraging you to pre-order this book and/or request it at your local library.) Sharma is also the author of a short story collection, Favorite Monster. Her short fiction has appeared in Kenyon Review, Iowa Review, Fugue, Sonora Review and elsewhere. She received her B.A. in English Literature from the University of Washington (2000) and her MFA from the University of Montana (2004). Sharma has worked in independent bookstores and public libraries throughout Washington State and now lives in Spokane with her husband and two young children. Click here to visit her website. She can also be tracked down on Facebook and Twitter.

My First Book and (another) Baby

In the late spring of 2011, I received word from Autumn House Press that my manuscript, Favorite Monster, was a finalist for their annual fiction contest. The manuscript had, in previous years, been a finalist for similar competitions (the Flannery O’Connor Award and the New American Press Fiction Prize), but it had never won, and part of me thought, Well, that’s nice, but we all know it’s never going to happen. My therapist likes to tell me I’m a loyal skeptic, and my consistent doubt about my writing is a great example of what this entails: I was committed to editing and submitting my work, but I doubted it would ever be good enough to find a happy home. In general, I believe I’m protecting myself by assuming the worst.

A couple of weeks later, my cell phone buzzed, and I glanced at it and then chose to ignore it, not recognizing the number. I worked as an information specialist at the Spokane Valley Library, and I was running late, handing off my toddler to my mom, scurrying (as usual) to find my keys and glasses. The phone buzzed again, indicating a message left, and I put it to my ear and listened to it as I headed out the door.

It was Michael Simms of Autumn House Press. Stewart O’Nan, a writer I deeply admired (and still do), had finished reading the manuscripts ahead of schedule, and he’d already chosen the winner. Could I give Michael a call back, please? He had news that would likely make me very happy. I turned around, trembling, and reentered the house.

My mom was downstairs in our basement. She has always been a hard-working woman, the sort who must be helping someone or cleaning something at all times, and she was already at work on our intimidating mountain of laundry. She was a lifesaver for me then. I was exhausted. I had recently had an MRI for numbness in my legs, and three lesions on my brain suggested multiple sclerosis, although my doctor at the time dropped the ball when my symptoms subsided and I would not be officially diagnosed for another two years (right about when my debut novel sold—another “first time”). I was also, as I would learn two weeks later, pregnant with my second child. My mom’s industriousness made me both keenly guilty and grateful.

My mom probably thought I was sick as I approached, pale and shaking, still gripping my phone.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

I enfolded her in a hug.

“I think I won,” I said, and I started to sob. “I think I won the fiction contest. They just called. I think they’re going to publish my book!”

My mom, with her big heart, started crying, too. We stood there in my dank, unfinished basement crying together, and when my hands stopped shaking, I had the wherewithal to say, “Well, maybe I’m getting ahead of myself. Maybe I’m a runner-up or something.”

That would make me happy, too, I told myself, but I hoped, and hoped hard, that the book would be published.

I called Michael back but he wasn’t there, having left for lunch, so I drove to work with my phone sitting on the passenger seat. Michael called right as I pulled into the Spokane Valley Library’s parking lot. To my relief and absolute joy, it was true: Stewart O’Nan had selected Favorite Monster as the winner. My book would be published the following year. I could not thank Michael enough. I must have sounded like a crazy person, jabbering and laughing and crying into the phone like a total nutjob, but I’m sure he’s used to it, having published so many of us fledgling writers.

A couple of weeks later, I figured out I was pregnant. My April 2012 publication date coincided amusingly with my pregnancy: Louise was born on 4-12-12. She came on a day I was scheduled to be on a humor panel with writers Jess Walter, Steve Almond, and Shawn Vestal, which was to be the first big event of my literary career. I missed that great event, but I took part in an even bigger one, and I have no regrets about it.

This is the last Friday Freebie of 2014 and I'm clearing the shelves of books which have been patiently waiting in the wings for their chance to be given away (books have these kinds of feelings, right?). This week, one lucky reader will win a copy of ALL the following books:

The Transcriptionist by Amy Rowland: Once, there were many transcriptionists at the "Record," a behemoth New York City newspaper, but new technology has put most of them out of work. So now Lena, the last transcriptionist, sits alone in a room--a human conduit, silently turning reporters' recorded stories into print--until the day she encounters a story so shocking that it shatters the reverie that has become her life. This exquisite novel, written by an author who spent more than a decade as a transcriptionist at the New York Times, asks probing questions about journalism and ethics, about the decline of the newspaper and the failure of language. It is also the story of a woman's effort to establish her place in an increasingly alien and alienating world.

The Unlikely Settler by Lipika Pelham: The Israeli-Palestinian conflict seen by an outsider who craves to make sense of herself, her marriage, and the city she lives in. The Unlikely Settler is none other than a young Bengali journalist who moves to Jerusalem with her English-Jewish husband and two children. He speaks Arabic and is an arch believer in the peace process; she leaves her career behind to follow his dream. Jerusalem propels Pelham into a world where freedom from tribal allegiance is a challenging prospect. From the school you choose for your children to the wine you buy, you take sides at every turn. Pelham’s complicated relationship with her husband, Leo, is as emotive as the city she lives in, as full of energy, pain, and contradictions. As she tries to navigate the complexities and absurdities of daily life in Jerusalem, often with hilarious results, Pelham achieves deep insights into the respective woes and guilt of her Palestinian and Israeli friends. Her intelligent analysis suggests a very different approach to a potential resolution of the conflict.

Wanting by Richard Flanagan: Internationally acclaimed and profoundly moving, Richard Flanagan’s Wanting is a stunning tale of colonialism, ambition, and the lusts and longings that make us human. This 2008 novel by the author of The Narrow Road to the Deep North links two icons of Western civilization through a legendarily disastrous arctic exploration, and one of the most infamous episodes in human history: the colonization of Tasmania. In 1841, Sir John Franklin and his wife, Lady Jane, move to the remote penal colony of Van Diemen’s Land, now Tasmania. There Lady Jane falls in love with a lively aboriginal girl, Mathinna, whom she adopts and makes the subject of a grand experiment in civilization—one that will determine whether science, Christianity, and reason can be imposed in the place of savagery, impulse, and desire. A quarter of a century passes. Sir John Franklin disappears in the Arctic with his crew and two ships on an expedition to find the fabled Northwest Passage. England is horrified by reports of cannibalism filtering back from search parties, no one more so than the most celebrated novelist of the day, Charles Dickens. As Franklin’s story becomes a means to plumb the frozen depths of his own life, Dickens finds a young actress thawing his heart.

Hollow Mountain by Thomas Mogford: Danger has followed the lawyer Spike Sanguinetti back to Gibraltar. The disturbing question of what happened to Spike’s girlfriend, Zahra, is still unanswered. He hasn’t heard from her since she vanished in Malta months ago, when suddenly his phone rings. It’s Zahra, but she sounds strange. She tells him that he has to stop looking for her and that if he doesn’t, Žigon will come after those closest to him. Then she hangs up. When Peter Galliano, Spike’s partner in the law firm, is hospitalized by a mysterious hit-and-run accident, and a woman asks him to investigate the suspected suicide of her husband, Spike finds himself on a perilous path that draws him into international politics and leads him, finally, to the hollow mountain.

Proof of Angels by Mary Curran Hackett: From the critically acclaimed author of Proof of Heaven comes an unforgettable tale that asks the question "Are there angels among us?" Sean Magee is a firefighter--a hero who risks his own life to save others, running into dangerous situations few have the courage to dare. While fighting a horrific blaze, Sean becomes trapped by flames and is nearly overcome by smoke. Just when it seems that all is lost, he's led to a window, by what he swears is divine intervention. And then he jumps....into a new life. For years, Sean has shut down his feelings, existing in a state of emotional numbness. Coming through that fire, he knows he can no longer be that man whose heart is closed to the world. But before he can face his future, he must confront his past and everyone in it: the family, the friends, the woman--and the love--he carelessly left behind.

Forgiving Maximo Rothman by A. J. Sidransky: On a chilly autumn night in New York, the lives of two men born decades and continents apart collide when Max Redmond is found bludgeoned in his Washington Heights apartment. While investigating the crime, Detective Tolya Kurchenko comes across the dead man's diaries, written by Redmond over four decades. He hopes the diaries will lead him to the killer. In fact, they help him sort out the complexities of his own identity. Spanning 65 years and three continents--from Hitler's Europe to the decaying Soviet Empire of the 1970s, and revealing the little-known history of Sosúa, a Jewish settlement in the jungles of the Dominican Republic--A. J. Sidransky's debut novel leads us into worlds long gone, and the lives of people still touched by those memories.

The Sound of Broken Glass by Deborah Crombie: On a blisteringly hot August afternoon in Crystal Palace, once home to the tragically destroyed Great Exhibition, a solitary 13-year-old boy meets his next-door neighbor, a recently widowed young teacher hoping to make a new start in the tight-knit South London community. Drawn together by loneliness, the unlikely pair forms a deep connection that ends in a shattering act of betrayal. Meanwhile, in the present...On a cold January morning in London, Detective Inspector Gemma James is back on the job now that her husband, Detective Superintendent Duncan Kincaid, is at home to care for their three-year-old foster daughter. Assigned to lead a murder-investigation team in South London, she's assisted by her trusted colleague, newly promoted Detective Sergeant Melody Talbot. Their first case: a crime scene at a seedy hotel in Crystal Palace. The victim: a well-respected barrister, found naked, trussed, and apparently strangled. Is it an unsavory accident or murder? In either case, he was not alone, and Gemma's team must find his companion--a search that takes them into unexpected corners and forces them to contemplate unsettling truths about the weaknesses and passions that lead to murder. Ultimately, they will begin to question everything they think they know about their world and those they trust most.

This is the Way by Gavin Corbett: From a startling new voice in Irish fiction, a mesmerizing tale of a young man on the run in Dublin. Anthony Sonaghan is hiding out in an old tenement house in Dublin: he fears he has reignited an ancient feud between the two halves of his family. Twenty-first-century Dublin may have shopping malls and foreign exchange students, but Anthony is from an Irish Travelling community, where blood ties are bound deeply to the past. When his roguish uncle Arthur shows up on his doorstep with a missing toe, delirious and apparently on the run, history and its troubles are following close behind him—and Anthony will soon have to face the question of who he really is. In prose of exceptional vividness, Gavin Corbett brings us a narrator with the power to build a new, previously unimagined world. His language, shot through with dreams and myths, summons a vision of Ireland in which a premodern spirit has somehow persisted into contemporary life, brooding and overlooked. Funny, terrible, unsettling, fiercely unsentimental, This Is the Way is haunted by some of Ireland’s greatest writers even as it breaks new ground and asks afresh why the imagination is so necessary to survival.

Sniper by Vaughn C. Hardacker: When a sniper kills four people on Boston Common, Boston homicide detective Mike Houston and his partner Anne Bouchard are sent to investigate the case. Amidst the blood and terror, Houston discovers similarities, likenesses--the killer's positioning, his choice of victims, and his code of ethics--between the crime scene and his own training as a US Marine scout and sniper. And with the staging of the scene set for prime shock value, Houston has to wonder what it is this murderer intends to accomplish. The connection is confirmed in the worst possible way when the sniper strikes again, this time killing Houston's ex-wife, severing what's left of the bond between Houston and his estranged daughter, Susie. It's personal now, and as the death toll rises, Houston and Bouchard will stop at nothing to find the cold-blooded sniper who's making a mockery of their department. In a final gesture of cat and mouse depravity, the killer kidnaps Susie, luring Houston to an island on a remote lake in Maine for a deadly, sniper-to-sniper showdown.

Passenger on the Pearl by Winifred Conkling: This new book from Algonquin Young Readers is a page-turning, heart-wrenching true story of one young woman willing to risk her safety and even her life for a chance at freedom in the largest slave escape attempt in American history. In 1848, Emily Edmonson, thirteen, along with five siblings and seventy other enslaved people, boarded the Pearl in the Potomac River in Washington, D.C., in a bid to reach freedom. Within a day, the schooner was captured, and the six Edmonsons were sent to New Orleans to be sold. Emily and Mary were saved from the even crueler conditions when the threat of yellow fever forced their return to Virginia. They were eventually ransomed with the help of their parents and abolitionists, including Harriet Beecher Stowe, who later used them as models for characters in Uncle Tom's Cabin. Both girls went to Oberlin College, where Mary died of tuberculosis. Emily graduated and became a teacher at the first school in Washington, D.C., dedicated to the education of African American girls and young women--an idea so controversial that even Frederick Douglass advised against it. Emily also worked on behalf of abolition for the rest of her life. Passenger on the Pearl illustrates a turbulent time in American history as seen through the daily lives of enslaved people; the often changing laws affecting them; the high cost of a failed attempt to reach liberty; the fate of all fourteen of the Edmonson children and their mother, Milly, whose goal to die a free woman shaped the lives of all her children; and the stories of the slave traders and abolitionists whose lives intersected with the Edmonsons. With more than fifty period photographs and illustrations.

Want Not by Jonathan Miles: From the critically acclaimed author of Dear American Airlinescomes a compulsively readable, deeply human novel that charts the course of three intersecting lives—a freegan couple living off the grid in Manhattan, a once prominent linguist struggling with midlife, and a New Jersey debt-collection magnate with a new family and a second chance at getting things right—in a thoroughly contemporary examination of that most basic and unquenchable emotion: want. Praise: "A wonderful book, and there's no one I would not urge to read it . . . This is the work of a fluid, confident and profoundly talented writer who gets more fluid, more confident and seemingly more talented even within the book itself." (Dave Eggers)

If you’d like a chance at winning ALL THE BOOKS, simply email your name and mailing address to

Put FRIDAY FREEBIE in the e-mail subject line. One entry per person, please. Despite its name, the Friday Freebie runs all week long and remains open to entries until midnight on Jan. 1, at which time I’ll draw the winning name. I’ll contact the lucky reader on Jan. 2. Your email address and other personal information will never be sold or given to a third party (except in those instances where the publisher requires a mailing address for sending Friday Freebie winners copies of the book).

Want to double your odds of winning? Get an extra entry in the contest by posting a link to this webpage on your blog, your Facebook wall or by tweeting it on Twitter. Once you’ve done any of those things, send me an additional e-mail saying “I’ve shared” and I’ll put your name in the hat twice.

Wednesday, December 24, 2014

When I sit in my favorite reading chair in December and think about all the books about to come my way over the next twelve months, there is, admittedly, a feeling both of dread and hope. I want my reading to be something I look forward to each day, a feeling of can't-wait-to-get-to-the-page. Sometimes the reading year turns out to have that kind of vibrancy....but there have been times when it seems every other book was heavy and dull as lead, the language uninspired and the characters flat.

Happily, 2014 was less dross and more gold. In fact, it turned out to be one of the best reading years I've had in a long time--particularly for first novels. Maybe I was just making better choices this year, or maybe the publishing stars were in full alignment. Whatever the reason, my Library Thing catalog was dominated by four- and five-star ratings this year.

This was the year I vowed to read authors who'd been languishing in my To-Be-Read queue for far too long. I started with Donna Tartt (The Secret History--one of the best non-2014 books I read in the past twelve months), and moved on to Elizabeth Gaskell (North and South) before diving into a deep pool of Anthony Doerr. I couldn't have picked a better year to read my way through the Boise, Idaho writer's canon, because while Memory Wall and The Shell Collector were excellent examples of the short-story form, this year's novel All the Light We Cannot See proved to be his masterpiece. A simple plot synopsis—blind French girl and Hitler Youth boy communicate via radio during World War Two—doesn't do Doerr's novel justice. This is a 500-page page-turner whose story lives and breathes at the sentence level. Every word is a gem, placed with a pair of jeweler's tweezers into its place on the page. The result is a story as intricate as the model city M. LeBlanc builds for his daughter Marie-Laure. Just like that French locksmith, Anthony Doerr is a master craftsman. I can't wait to read his other two books: the novel About Grace and the memoir Four Seasons in Rome.

Near the end of this gut-honest memoir about poet Brian Turner’s time in Iraq, he writes: “America, vast and laid out from one ocean to another, is not a large enough space to contain the war each soldier brings home.” Likewise, this book and its 224 pages probably cannot hold all the rampaging emotions of Turner’s war experience, but damn if he doesn’t spill a lot of emotional blood in the course of these 136 short chapters. As anyone who has read Turner’s two collections of poetry (Here, Bullet and Phantom Noise) will tell you, he’s able to turn even the most horrific topics--death, dismemberment, sexual assault, post-traumatic nightmares--into things of linguistic beauty. In My Life as a Foreign Country, he once again brings the war home to us. Are we bold enough to hold his words?

Victoria Wilson spent 15 years deep-sea diving into Barbara Stanwyck's life. After I closed the 1,056th page of her book about actress Barbara Stanwyck, I wanted more, more, more! Specifically, I wanted to read more about Stanwyck because Wilson only covers the first third of the screen legend’s life. I’m praying that Volume 2 (which will begin right around the time Stanwyck is filming Frank Capra’s Meet John Doe) is on its way soon. We don’t often see a Hollywood biographer give the same kind of treatment to her subject like, say, Robert A. Caro devotes to his multi-volume look at Lyndon B. Johnson’s life; but Stanwyck seems to deserve it. She was a tough pioneer in the Golden Age of Tinseltown (she was the first actress under contract to two studios at the same time) and Wilson paints a rich, full-bodied portrait of a woman who once self-deprecatingly said, “I have the face that sank a thousand ships.” Maybe Stanwyck wasn’t the most conventionally gorgeous actress of her era (hello, Vivien Leigh!), but she sure could act her way out of a thousand wet paper bags.

Part memoir, part investigative journalism, Demon Camp tells the troubling story of a soldier named Caleb Daniels who turns to a "Christian exorcism camp" in Georgia as a way of getting rid of "the Black Thing" which has plagued him since his return from Afghanistan after a Chinook helicopter carrying sixteen Special Ops soldiers crashes during a rescue mission, killing everyone on board, including Caleb's best friend Kip Jacoby. Back stateside, Caleb begins to see dead soldiers everywhere and is convinced he's been possessed by a demon. To rid himself of these apparitions, he decides to kill himself...but veers off instead into the company of the bizzaro camp in rural Georgia. At this point, Jennifer Percy, gathering notes for a story about soldiers suffering from PTSD, gets personally involved in Caleb's life. That's when things get really interesting. In her debut, Percy has delivered a book that's haunting, empathetic, and crackling with beautiful sentences. Demon Camp reads like a fevered dream and, if you're like me, it will stay with you for a long, long time after you turn the final page.

This was the year for Montana novelists and Malcolm Brooks' debut was among the best of them. (Full disclosure: Malcolm lives just up the road from me and we've become good friends...but only after I finished reading Painted Horses, so I think my initial assessment is still relatively untainted.) Set in the Big Sky state in the mid-1950s, Painted Horses gives us an American West on the cusp of change. Catherine Lemay is a young archaeologist hired to survey a canyon in advance of a major dam project; her job is to make sure nothing of historic value will be lost in the coming flood—a task that proves to be more complicated than she thought after she meets John H, a mustanger and a veteran of the U.S. Army’s last mounted cavalry campaign, who’s been living a fugitive life in the canyon. Together, the two race against time to save the past before it is destroyed by an industry with an eye on the future. Painted Horses is unlike any “western” I’ve read; it refreshes the genre while nodding back at its roots. This novel should already be at the top of the list for Larry McMurtry Fan Club members.

Josh Weil's first full-length novel The Great Glass Sea, long-awaited after his debut collection of novellas The New Valley, is many things (apart from being great indeed). It's about a giant greenhouse, mirrors floating in space, sibling rivalry, and a Russia unlike the one we know. It is a story about the complicated love between brothers. It is a multi-genre novel that takes meaty bites of science-fiction, fantasy, magical realism, and big Russian books by the likes of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Solzhenitsyn. It is a superb meditation on individualism and the cost of courage. It is a book with a chapter ("Heaven's Breast") which contains some of the most breath-taking imagery of ANY book I read in the past five years (I'd quote the entire chapter here if I could, but I can't, so you'll just have to go out and buy the book for yourself to experience the beauty for yourself). And The Great Glass Sea is a book rife with beautiful sentences like these: "He breathed in. If there was a faint redolence of mushroom and cigarettes and something fresh and sharp as a radish newly bit, on her it still seemed unlike anything he'd ever known." And, "Nothing bold was ever built without someone deciding where to lay the first stone." Or, "And the hail spilled down, a ceaseless clattering of pearls stripped off a broken string wrapped round and round the welkin neck, each one a whisper through the clouds, a multitude of last prayers mouthed, until the final stone slipped off the necklace end and down the breast of heaven and left the clouds all hushed." The Great Glass Sea is a big book of 400 pages, but I found myself taking it slow, savoring the many delicious lines along the way to its wholly-satisfying finish.

In Cara Hoffman's riveting novel, Lauren Clay has returned from a tour of duty in Iraq in time to spend Christmas holiday with her father and younger brother Danny. All seems fine on the surface, but—as with Caleb Daniels in Demon Camp—there are some rough seas building inside Lauren. Be Safe I Love You is populated with engaging characters and carries an urgent message about how we treat our veterans returning from war. I also appreciated Cara Hoffman's exceptional novel for the way it portrayed female soldiers--characters of whom we see far too little in contemporary fiction.

When I think back to everything I read in 2014, Bill Roorbach's novel takes the prize for Book Which Most Bruised Strangers' Palms After I Shoved It Into Their Hands. The Remedy for Love is definitely a "You must read this!" kind of book. Here's a pithy plot synopsis (which is actually the blurby words of praise I gave the novel after reading an advance copy): Take two strangers—Eric, a small-town lawyer, and Danielle, a former schoolteacher turned homeless squatter—put them in a cabin in the Maine woods, spice it up with a little romantic tension, stir in the wreckage of past love affairs, sprinkle liberally with sharp, funny dialogue, then add the Storm of the Century which buries the cabin in huge drifts of snow, and—voila!—you've got The Remedy for Love, one of the best novels of this or any year. I'm not a doctor, but I'll be prescribing Bill Roorbach's novel to readers sick of blase, cliched love stories that follow worn-out formulas. What we have here is a flat-out funny, sexy, and poignant romantic thriller. The Remedy for Love is good medicine which most readers will want to swallow in one dose. I don't, however, have a remedy for those bruises on your hands. Sorry about that.

Believe everything you've heard about this book--it deserves every syllable of praise! Phil Klay's short stories put the Iraq War and its lingering after-taste right in our laps—which is exactly where the war needs to be. Want to know what it was really like to fight a troubling, complicated war? Read these stories and you'll be there in the sand with Klay's characters. This fiction, true as anything else you'll read, penetrates to the heart of what it's like to serve on a modern-day battlefield (both overseas and back here in America). Unflinchingly honest, these stories never blink. It's no hyperbole to say the Iraq War has finally found its voice.

Sentence-for-sentence, Elizabeth McCracken’s new collection of short stories (her first since 1993’s Here’s Your Hat What’s Your Hurry) is the best value for lovers of fine, funny writing. I can't tell you how many times I chuckled (and, on occasion, let go into a barking, clear-the-room peal of laughter) while making my way through these stories. That's all well and good, but McCracken can also break the reader's heart--see, for example, the title story in which a family's trip to Paris is interrupted by their rebellious daughter's risky behavior; or “Peter Elroy: A Documentary by Ian Casey” where the now-dying subject of the documentary tries to turn the tables on the filmmaker years after their relationship was ruptured by betrayal. Thunderstruck was the one book I read this year which brought me equal doses of joy and sadness. I loved every minute of it.

One of the smartest books I've ever read about the hazards of parenting in the Golden Age of Facebook is, predictably enough, only available as an e-book. You shouldn't let that stop you from downloading Lydia Netzer's wickedly funny novella Everybody's Baby and reading it on whatever platform you choose. Just have plenty of screen wipes handy to clean up your laugh-spittle. A tall, curly-haired Scot, Billy Bream is the expectant father in Everybody's Baby who just can't stay off his laptop and tablet--even as his wife, Jenna, is screaming through her labor pains in the delivery room. Admit it: we all have a touch of the Billy in us. However, obsessively checking our social media feeds is where most of us stop. Billy and Jenna take it two or three steps further by engaging a little too much with the online community. Everybody's Baby turns into a cautionary tale for our times--a clever morality play where God is not just some deus ex machina flying in on pulleys and wires in the Third Act, but is really in the machine. Jenna and Billy decide to pay for their baby by crowd-sourcing bits of the infant to strangers on the internet. Every Kickstarter comes with perks, but in the case of "everybody's baby," those benefits turn into something that is, at heart, rather terrifying--things like: for $10, "You receive an invitation to appear waving in a crowd, captured on film for a segment in the baby’s first birthday video," or, for $30, "You can rub the pregnant belly, at a designated belly-rubbing station, on a designated rubbing day, to be determined," or, for $300, you can "Take home the placenta to do with as you will." The problems Billy and Jenna face aren't the typical challenges of first-time parents, but they are fears which most of us have faced at one point or another: How much is too much? How do we retain our identity in an increasingly-homogenized, flat-lined electronic world? Where do we draw the boundaries of privacy? This extends far beyond the screens on our electronic devices. Even if you're not sharing kitten-and-dolphin videos on Facebook, chances are that someone in the grocery line has stood too close to you, poked you with a personal question, or asked to rub your pregnant belly. For a longer treatment of modern romance (also available in the "dead-tree" print format) I also highly recommend Netzer's other 2014 novel, How to Tell Toledo From the Night Sky. Both books are sheer delights.

There are books you read, and then there are books which read you--the ones that go deep inside, each word a tiny mirror forcing you to question who you are and how you see the world. Roxane Gay's debut novel is one of those books. It is horrific, it is beautiful, it is uncompromising. An Untamed State opens with the dissolution of a fairy tale. Haitian-American Mireille Duval Jameson, daughter of one of the most powerful men of Port-au-Prince, is abducted while on vacation visiting her family. Gay gets right down to it with the novel's first sentence: "Once upon a time, in a far-off land, I was kidnapped by a gang of fearless yet terrified young men with so much impossible hope beating inside their bodies it burned their very skin and strengthened their will right through their bones." From that impossible-to-put-down opening chapter, we follow Mireille's captivity, blow by blow. The chapter headings resemble stick numbers a prisoner might scratch on a wall and we are there with Mireille, chained to a bed as she is tortured and repeatedly raped, the kidnapping stretching to unendurable lengths when her wealthy father refuses to pay the ransom. An Untamed State is a difficult book to read--those little word-mirrors burn, burn, burn--but once begun, it's nearly impossible to stop. "When I closed my eyes, I was no one," Mireille says. "I was the woman who forced herself to forget her husband, her child, all the joy she had ever known, who carefully stripped herself of her memories so she could survive." Narratively-speaking, I'm in awe of what Gay has done here--especially when, midway through the novel, gears shift and it becomes a no-less-tense account of healing, recovery and the hard, seemingly-impossible journey toward hope--which, fittingly, is literally the final word of the novel.

This science-fiction novel may be the most imperfect book on this list--some of the dialogue feels like it's cut-and-pasted from the lamest summer blockbuster movie and there are stretches where the science gets too heavy and I longed for more fiction--but The Martian was also the one I. Couldn't. Put. Down. Combining the best elements of Robinson Crusoe and the movies Castaway and Apollo 13, this is the white-knuckle read of the year. Author Andy Weir's forte is the plot hook: a geeky scientist on a mission to Mars gets stranded after a dust storm forces a hasty evacuation by his shipmates. When his fellow astronauts rocket off the planet without him (sort of a galactic Home Alone Moment), Mark Watney is left to fend for himself with very little food, dwindling batteries and zero communication with Earth. His ingenuity in building a livable shelter, creating soil to grow potatoes, and jury-rigging a rover to travel across the planet is breath-taking and inspiring.

On the surface, there’s not a lot of action in Kim Zupan’s debut novel: some shallow graves are dug, a sheriff’s deputy goes out with his dog to look for missing persons, and there’s one particularly harrowing chase through a field in a Montana prairie. Other than that, most of the “action” takes place in the lush language which fills the pages of The Ploughmen–primarily the late-night conversations between John Gload, a septuagenarian serial killer, and Valentine Millimaki, the aforementioned sheriff’s deputy who works the graveyard shift at the Copper County jail. As the book’s jacket copy explains, “With a disintegrating marriage further collapsing under the strain of his night duty, Millimaki finds himself seeking counsel from a man whose troubled past shares something essential with his own.” Most of the book consists of cat-and-mouse conversations between diabolical killer and sympathetic lawman (very Silence of the Lambs-ian), and I’ve gotta say, I was held spellbound for the entire 256 pages of the novel. Zupan spins his tale with sentences that are rich in imagery and complex in construction. This is a book which encourages readers to slow down and savor its near-poetic language. At the same time, Zupan ratchets up the suspense with a menacing undertow that pulled me deeper and deeper into the novel.

I will always remember 2014 as the year I discovered my new Author BFF. Included in the candy-colored pages of The Best American Comics 2014 was an excerpt from Raina Telgemeier's graphic novel Drama. I was quickly drawn in (pardon the pun) by Telgemeier's terrific pen work which combines realism with occasional cartoon-y flourishes (she cites Hi and Lois as one of her influences, and it's easy to see traces of that classic comic strip in the curves and lines of her characters). Drama is about the trials and tribulations of Callie and her junior-high friends as they rehearse for an upcoming school play. Telgemeier brilliantly captures what it's like to be young, in love, and ripe for public humiliation. I could totally relate. In fact, I loved the excerpt from Drama so much, I immediately went out and bought it and Telgemeier's other books: Sisters and Smile (her best work to date). I loved all of Telgemeier's Young Adult novels, but since this is about 2014, I'll say a few words on behalf of this year's Sisters. Like Smile, it's largely (if not wholly) autobiographical and, as you might expect, centers around the sibling rivalry between Raina and her younger sister Amara. The main narrative of Sisters revolves around a car trip from their home in San Francisco to a family reunion in Colorado, with flashbacks illuminating the dynamics between the characters. In addition to the squabbling between the sisters (and the mutual endurance tests a younger brother brings their way), the story also adds some heavier adult themes as, on the periphery, we see growing cracks in their parents' relationship. This lends the book an unexpected poignancy and realism. Though it may seem that Telgemeier's books are geared toward middle-grade readers (especially girls), I'm here to tell you that this middle-aged, greying man thoroughly enjoyed every hand-drawn panel of Telgemeier's graphic novel.

I finished out this year by finally succumbing to the battering-ram of praise for Jenny Offill's slim, sharp novel about a marriage beset by the pressures of parenthood and infidelity. As it turns out, all those other yea-sayers knew what they were talking about. Dept. of Speculation came at me like a bullet train whispering along the tracks--nearly silent in its approach, but tearing me limb from limb when it finally hit. It is a book which can be read in a single sitting (though I took three or four) and it welcomes--almost demands--an immediate re-read. The language has been honed and distilled to a purity not often found in contemporary writing. Dept. of Speculation makes its strongest mark at the individual sentence level ("The baby's eyes were dark, almost black, and when I nursed her in the middle of the night, she'd stare at me with a stunned, shipwrecked look as if my body were the island she'd washed up on." Or, "A dog runs through the field, his dark fur ruffled with light."), but it's only when I finished the novel that I was able to appreciate the totality of its impact. It's a jigsaw puzzle whose 1,000 pieces interlock perfectly.

The Quivering Pen

The Quivering Pen's motto can be summed up in two words: Book Evangelism. The blog is written and curated by David Abrams, author of the novels Brave Deeds (Grove/ Atlantic, 2017) and Fobbit (Grove/ Atlantic, 2012), from his home office in Butte, Montana. It is fueled by early-morning cups of coffee, the occasional bowl of Cheez-Its, and a lifelong love of good books.